


looking out for love in the middle of the night

by orosea



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (very small mention not part of the main plot), Background appearances of Mercy and Soldier 76, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Implied/Referrenced Miscarriage, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 15:29:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11947176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orosea/pseuds/orosea
Summary: Panicking, Amélie holds tight onto the front of his button up, pulling him in for another. His lips are chapped but plush and he still smells like minty candy. By all accounts it should've been pleasant, the reuniting of star-crossed lovers.Instead it tastes like disappointment.





	looking out for love in the middle of the night

There's a shift. Deep breaths rolling across her face in soft puffs. "H-hey," There is a shaking hand pressed gently to her forehead. Fingers slim like a woman’s. "Hey, Amélie, stay with me,"

Amélie. That's right. She's Amélie, she's one of the best dancers in France. She tries to breathe out a response to the angel above her but her lips are cracked and mouth dry. A fleeting thought slips through her mind about the release of death but this woman is anything but a reaper.

Her eyes flutter, locking briefly onto the golden glow around the woman's hair. The angel slackens in relief, holding a finger to her ear. "I found her," She swallows like she doesn’t want to jinx it. "Talon, they really- she's not in good condition."

Talon. It rings a bell but the more she thinks the more it hurts. Like rats scratching the base of her skull. A cold face. A deep voice, accented. The woman cuts through her voice, sharp and commanding. "I will not Jack!" A tightness winds in Amélie's chest, seizing with anxiety at the tone. "She's-" Nose pinched the woman sighs. "It looks like she was tortured. Waterboarding, removal of nails, her skin- well it's- it's blue."

Strange. Amélie doesn't feel anything but numb, preserved even. If her nails are removed like the woman says, she doesn't feel it. She tries experimentally flexing a hand but the woman catches her arm immediately with a hiss. "Jack, I don't care about Overwatch protocol. Gérard is worried sick," A long pause. "This is Amélie."

Gérard. The name is on the tip of Amélie's tongue and it feels warm and tastes sweet. The angel knows her, not just her name but the actual Amélie. Overwatch? Amélie tries to open her eyes again but is only met with more grogginess. Who is Jack? What does he have against her?

The angel is back off of her comms, a slender hand wiping sweat from Amélie's brow. "Hey, it's Angela. We've been looking for you for days, I'm so sorry." Her hand trembles and Amélie hears her rummaging through a bag around her hip. "I'm going to give you a sedative for the pain and the next time you wake up, I promise, you'll be safe."

Amélie tries to tell her that she’s fine really. But there is a hard edge to her words and Amélie can only give a minuscule nod before giving in to the blankness awaiting her.

She awakens to something much more bright than the steel cell she was in before. There's a head of raven hair resting on her arm and someone gripping her hand.

She jostles and the man jolts awake, their hands still intertwined. "Amélie?" His voice cracks and Amélie tries hard not to flinch at the relief in his voice. She does not remember this man. His smile is soft and Amélie can tell why she would fall for this man in the past. Present. Future. She jars when he speaks again. "I always knew blue was a good color on you."

For no inexplicable reason known to Amélie, she cries then, weeps like a child in Gérard's arms. She cries and cries, snot bubbling around her nose and fat tears wetting her hospital gown. A wave of fear sweeps through her, she cries for herself, not for Gérard or even Angela.

Because she does not feel anything for these people and that terrifies her more than anything. They know her, love her, and yet she can only remember her name, career, social security number. She feels cold.

She is taken back to what she assumes is her home. Gérard doesn't press on matters though Amélie can feel that he desperately wants to. She wants to answer him, to confess that she can't remember him. She wants it so badly that the feeling seeps into her bones, a dull ache that would be biting if she could feel like a normal human being.

She wants-needs to love Gérard but anything she feels is trapped inside her chest, thumping like a bird flapping its wings inside a cage. Sometimes she wonders if she's Amélie. Jack did happen to imply she was threat after her Talon abduction.

She has seen Gérard dig his heels in, bucking against the command Jack exerts. "She is going home. You are not putting her back into confinement." Gérard had spat. "Angela said she was nearly brain dead when she arrived and I'll be damned if you try and interrogate her for your grudge against Talon. She is not your agent she is my wife!"

Amélie was sure the old version of her knew some way to calm him down, a hand on his, a squeeze on the arm, anything. Amélie is shaken from her reverie when Gérard slams the front door of the manor behind them.

"Our room is three doors down on the left," Amélie shoulders her bag but pauses as Gérard speaks again. "You can talk to me you know. I thought that if maybe we were alone," He trails off and Amélie shifts on her feet uncomfortably.

 _Naive_. A voice nags at the back of her mind, shocking her. It’s frigid and it doesn’t feel like anything she’s supposed to feel for Gérard. He doesn’t at all know what I’ve gone though. The thoughts surface, bobbing to the forefront of her mind, like buoys in a rippling ocean. _He may as well be a stranger to me._

Her breath catches. It’s true, she doesn’t remember anything about this man, only fuzzy recollections of candlelit caresses and saccharine sayings. Gérard doesn’t know this of course. He thinks she’s traumatized, mute from whatever Talon put her through.

Amélie doesn’t feel traumatized though. Only apathy has buzzed through her for days now and she knows it should disconcert her. Ironically, she can’t bring herself to care. Instead she focuses on neatly unpacking her remaining belongings. A shirt pokes out from the bottom of the pile, she folds it, one, two, three times before she is satisfied.

Lips pursed in distaste, she finds that she needs to refold all of the other clothes as well. That is where Gérard finds her nearly an hour later, still working on the flimsy cotton in her hands. Amélie wonders if she’s always been this compulsive, calculated. From the intense crease in his brow she can tell she is mistaken.

She sleeps far away from him that night. He doesn’t complain about the temperature of her body, how the silk sheets around her legs are only for show rather than use. She thinks it scares him, that she is freezing and doesn’t seem to feel it at all.

Gérard is not behaving like what she remembers but that doesn’t mean much when she doesn’t remember anything but calculations. Height, weight, anything statistical. And if the Amélie before was warm and sociable, does that mean that what she is now serves a different purpose? Why can she remember what pulling a trigger feels like rather than a lovers touch?

Amélie dreams that night. It comes through like static on a television, kisses on necks, declarations of love, her wedding vows. Everything feels blocked, clogged even. The voice is in her dreams even,  _someone is blocking your memories, doesn’t Gérard seem strange?_

She takes it seriously. What if she isn’t Amélie? What if her lover isn’t this Gérard? It almost makes her panic, she’s going to drive herself crazy. She feels like an intruder in her own mind, a mind that’s been abandoned. Infested with rats and cobwebs, she feels unwelcome in her own home.

She puts Gérard on edge. He doesn’t say it aloud but when he found Amélie staring at a portrait of herself in the parlour, he almost jumps at her first words. “Take this down please.” Before spinning on heel and exiting the room. She didn’t like how it looked, content and worry free. She can’t imagine herself like that at any point in her life.

Sure enough, the portrait is gone next time Amélie enters the room but her mouth is still set in a hard frown as her stares meets the blank space where she used to be.There is no relief.

She finds Gérard’s shooting range out in the courtyard the next day. She supposes she’s silly for thinking that a commanding officer of a worldwide freelance military service wouldn’t have weapons in his home.

Gérard shows her where the guns are, surprised that she could not recall. The sniper he lends her feels heavy and familiar. Her mind doesn’t falter, it’s thrilling really, her breath pausing in her chest, raising the scope, hitting the target. It hits dead center and for the first time in weeks she feels something thrumming in her veins.

Gérard is paper white behind her, mouth ajar. “You were never much of a shot,” He gulps anxiously. “But I suppose there is a first time for everything.” Fool, she bites. Amélie is almost convinced she is not his man’s wife. He’s naive, soft, too easily caught off guard. But he loves her. And that is all she has even if she cannot love him back.

From that day on Gérard changes, becomes more reserved and observant of her. He feels on edge and in turn Amélie feels like she is on a tightrope. He starts to snap at her towards the end of their first month together. Amélie had absentmindedly remarked that she didn’t quite remember where the bathroom was on the wing of the manor.

“You don’t remember anything?” The words are supposed to be a question but come out as an accusation. Amélie’s mouth dries and she flounders for a statement for a brief second. “Are you even-”

Tongue no longer cotton in her mouth she interrupts before he can speak what she fears into existence. “Talon,” She lies easily, something she can remember doing well even before her so-called disappearance. “What they did- what they took from me? It was more than I thought.” Her voice pitches up in nervousness.

Tongue running behind her teeth Amélie waits until the coal in his eyes melt. Gérard apologizes then, stilted and obviously remorseful. He even sleeps in another room that night after another profuse apology.

The dreams return to her that evening. Not of tenderness. She gets screaming, pain, the old Amélie lying. She catches bits and pieces. “I told you,” Her voice warbles. “You don’t harm Gérard, I’ve only been informing you this long for him!” The words are spoken fiercely to a large man with a gauntlet on one fist. “You promised me!” The words trail into a weak sniffle.

The image is blurry but Amélie can only picture a smirk on the man’s face before the dream blacks out. “Oh little bird,” His accented voice had replied. “You are so naive.”

The old Amélie had secrets. The old Amélie knew Talon. So why was she tortured? Was she tortured? Amélie can’t remember anything but the screams in her dreams certainly told a tale. Was she spying on Overwatch? Is she still supposed to be spying on Overwatch?

Her gaze darts to Gérard across the breakfast table, nibbling on a piece of toast. Is she still supposed to be protecting him? She thinks it’s utterly silly. She does not have any fondness for Gérard as of late, especially the kind that she apparently used to harbor.

 _You could always get rid of him._ Amélie’s fork clatters to her plate, eggs flying into the air. The thought shocked her, she didn’t think that herself of course. Did she? Gérard eyes her strangely. “Everything okay?” She wants to roll her eyes at the innocuous question but stops herself.

Wiping a piece of scrambled egg from her maroon shirt, she excuses herself. “I’m just going to go get cleaned up.”

Everything Gérard does is slowly starting to drive her insane. It started off slowly, minor discomfort at his company, to annoyance, to what now? Hatred? Her head echoes, _hurt him, hurt him, it can be done easily._ She’s sweating, Amélie notes, but the voice doesn’t cease instead intensifying.

It feels like her skull is itching, tingling, burning even. _Hurt him_. Or we hurt you, goes unsaid. Her own thoughts feel like threats and she begins retching over the sink. Sweat beads at her brow and there is a pinching sensation on neck, like someone has grabbed her spinal cord and yanked.

She vomits into the sink. Ugly brown sludge filled with the morning’s breakfast. The pressure in her head dulls and the thoughts start to dissipate. Collapsing into the floor she gives a shaky sigh, head leaning back against the cool marble of the sink.

As much of a nightmare that it was she just experienced, it felt… familiar. She glances at her cuticles. Angela had said her fingernails had been nearly ripped off and that she had been suffocated. She didn’t say anything about head trauma but… brain-dead that was the word she used. Almost as if she had ‘rebooted’ Amélie.

Theoretically maybe Talon were the ones to reboot her. Maybe Amélie herself was in allegiance to Talon. There was absolutely no way of knowing. Although the voice insinuated she would get her memories back if she… no. She couldn’t do that.

Could she?

No. She’s still Amélie, right? The Amélie that gave up everything for that miserable fool. It would be wrong.

The nightmares begin the same night Gérard tries to kiss her for the first time since her return. His hand is calloused and radiates heat from where it rests on her shoulder blade. She wants this kiss, she thinks desperately to herself.

She wants this. She wants this. She needs this. They both do. It’s like a mantra, she wants to feel something for Gérard other than those compulsive, violent thoughts. She wants to feel like she’s her own skin, Amélie’s skin, for the first time in what feels like eternity.

Gérard leans in, he smells like peppermint and cologne. It’s nice. He gets closer and closer and closer. Amélie snaps her head to the right, causing his lips landing gently on her cheek. Gérard deflates and begins to loosen his grip on her.

Panicking, Amélie holds tight onto the front of his button up, pulling him in for another. His lips are chapped but plush and he still smells like minty candy. By all accounts it should've been pleasant, the reuniting of star crossed lovers. Instead it tastes like disappointment.

The kiss is awkward. Amélie pulls away like he is made of needles and Gérard only regards her with a sadness in his eyes. He leaves the room first and they do not share a bed that night. It is almost enough to make Amélie sick.

The searing in skull kicks into full blast when she returns to her room, worse than she had experienced before. She is prepared this time though, gagging into the trash bin beside her bed. The room spins. _Don’t let him take advantage of you again. Don’t lose yourself for him again._

Amélie wants to die. Her head feels like it’s been put into a meat grinder after it’s all over. Gérard can’t love a shell of woman, a smoke apparition of who Amélie used to be. She can’t get her memories back. _You can,_ her mind whispers incessantly. _You can, he can’t love you anyway, we will accept you as you are._

“We?” She murmurs to an empty room. Her thoughts refer to themselves as ‘we.’ Is something-someone keeping her memories from her? They’re within her reach, she just has to…

No. She goes to sleep early that night.

The nightmares aren’t intense. They’re more like Amélie slowly dissociating away from herself as terrible things happen to the lovely Amélie with the rose-kissed pink skin. She’s has had dreams of being suffocated every night this week alone. They’re always people talking the dreams, but there seems to be a thick film over the faces.

“Amélie, you can’t back out now.” It’s the deep voice again, smooth and cold.

“Bite me. If you can’t uphold your end forget about my end.”

The man chuckles and leans back in his chair, gauntlet glinting in the harsh light of the prison cell. “Well, you did happen to tell everything to little boy scout didn't you?”

Amélie gasps as his hand reaches up to grip her chin. “It was my last resort. You lied to me.” Her voice trembles. “I needed to at least warn them before you killed me.”

“Kill you?” The man echoes. “Now who would kill something as beautiful as a swan?” Amélie’s heart halts as man violently wraps a hand around her throat and squeezes. “I have other plans for you.”

Amélie wakes up clutching her windpipe and wheezing.

She feels something for the first time in a long time that morning. Pure unadulterated anger. He _knew_. Gérard knew she had been a spy, Jack knew, even Angela knew.

They treated her as glass, acted as if she was a victim when she was a criminal. She wasn’t confined to the manor because of her safety, it was because she is just as captive as she was before. Despite what Gérard said.

She compromised Overwatch to Talon. All because of some flimsy threats to Gérard. If there was any way Amélie would describe herself, it wouldn’t be weak. Yet all of those dreams… she was a pawn then. She’s a pawn now.

She’ll be a prisoner all her life. She’s a weapon, for both sides. They’re using her. Gérard doesn’t love her, Jack doesn’t trust her, and she has voices in her head telling her to murder her husband.

She yanks open the door to Gérard’s study with such force that he reaches for the pistol under the desk. “You knew!” Gérard’s eyes dart to her.

“Knew what?” His voice is measured and guarded.

Her voice shakes. “You let Jack use me as bait.” She’s slowly elevating into something that resembles shrieking.

There it is again, that look of pity that had Amélie squirming around in her own skin. “It’s how Angela knew where to find me, how she knew the coordinates.”

“You were a spy Amélie!” He cracks, cradling his head in his palms. “Jack wanted you arrested! He was going-” Gerard breaks off in sobs as if a dam had been broken. He is shaking, his form trembling, and yet, Amélie feels nothing.

“You were selfish Gérard. I suffered because of you. Look at me.” She gestures to herself, her dull skin and cold eyes. “Do you see Amélie?” There is pure adrenaline in her veins. She leaves before he can reply. She regrets this decision in the future. It will be too late then.

That night she decides what must be done. That night, Amélie wakes up at 1:53 am and decides that Gérard must hurt as much as she had. He had to pay for the punishment she endured. She would’ve rather taken years in prison than to be dangled like bait.

She doesn’t mean to kill him. They never said she had to kill him. She held the rope around his neck and she had anticipated him waking up, she just wanted him to experience the nightmares she had.

He struggles, a meaty arm wrapping around her neck and all of a sudden Amélie isn’t in control. It’s like a fight or flight response, she feels a familiar pinch in her neck. She remember his height, weight, and weaknesses, some type of… training. Her brain switches to auto piloting and the strong arm locked around her neck is twisted and flipped.

Gérard has the breath knocked out of him and Amelie pins a hand under one knee and his neck under the other. He begins to wheeze as she presses harder and Amelie starts to cry.

 _Stop_. He’s gripping her knee with his free hand.

 _Stop. Please._ He’s trying to say something, hands clawing at her calf and words airy.

 _I don’t want to do this._ His grip falls loose and Amélie regains control of her own body and starts to weep.

Her memories return sometime in the early morning. She is still has her knees drawn to her chest when she finally remembers their wedding vows. And their first night together. Her first pregnancy. Her miscarriage. His never ending compassion. The way it felt to dance in front of him and thousands of people. This was a devil’s deal. She will have to return to Talon. She cannot control herself.

They begin to call her Widowmaker.

**Author's Note:**

> lol ive never used ao3 but im trying. This is basically just me wanting more canon lore, i might actually do d.va next.
> 
> (title is from big love by fleetwood mac)


End file.
